Customer Success Manager (CSM) - A New Role?

Articles and Posts Nov 19, 2019 5 mins 5347 Views 0 Comments 0 Likes

Does your firm have Customer Success Managers? If not, maybe it should!

The Customer Success Manager (CSM) role is a relatively new, yet growing, job role used by companies offering more complex products and service offerings.

Customer Success Manager (CSM) - A New Role?

If you are selling mass produced goods such as consumer electronics, apparel, or household products, you can easily use print or electronic product descriptions to educate your prospective customers of the benefits and virtues of your offering. Same is the case with software or digital products with realtively simple features with intuitive interfaces and easy configuration options. However, if you are in the business of selling jet engines, enterprise software, or drilling equipment, your customer and prospective customers need more.

Here comes the Customer Success Manager... an often misunderstood yet, if employed correctly, a highly valuable asset to both your firm and your customers. A breed between product manager, sales person, and consultant, the Customer Success Manager should be your client's personal problem solver. Beyond just selling products and services, the CSM is there to help navigate the complexity of large product offering before, during, and after the sales and contract process.

Some of the key responsibilities of the Customer Success Manager include:

Be proficient in and advocate for your firm's products or services
Assist new clients with on-boarding, product setup, and product training
Understand your customer's core needs, problems, and challenges
Advocate for the customer and influence your product's future road-map and vision

Here are some examples of recent job postings for the role fo Customer Success Manager:

"As a Client Success Manager at Roostify, you'll interface directly with our new and existing clients to ensure that they are supremely successful and delighted by Roostify. Creative, energetic and self-driven, you learn everything you can about your accounts, key sponsors, users, and coaches and know how to be the voice of your clients. You can manage numerous important clients at different stages of the customer lifecycle with ease. Your natural curiosity leads you to deeply understand Roostify's products and the mortgage industry."

"As a Customer Success Manager (CSM) you play a pivotal role, partnering with DefinedCrowds customers to deliver a wide array of precise audio, text and image data to meet their AI training needs. Part Customer Advocate, part Consultant and part Project Manager, you leverage your capabilities and relationships working across multiple internal and external teams to ensure our customers receive the high-quality data they need to power their AI systems. You bring domain knowledge in speech/text, natural language processing (NLP), linguistics or image processing which allows you to confidently guide our customers in extracting highest value when leveraging our platform and services."

What do you think?

Would you consider such a role for your firm? Is the Customer Success Manager role for you?

Let us know what you think in the discussion comments below.

Continue reading at HBR.com